If You Want To Promise Yourself A Bright Future, Learning To Code Is The Best Thing You Can Do (Video)

Having dropped out of Columbia University in 2011 before his senior year, 23-year-old Zach Sims was never likely to buy into the idea of college as the be-all-end-all of education in America. While the cost of tuition has long been justified as an investment in one's future, one which is guaranteed to pay dividends in the long run, Sims says universities across the country aren't fulfilling the promise with which they are supposed to come.

"Instead what we're doing is graduating generations of people that are $200,000 in debt," he told Elite Daily. "They move back in with their parents, if they're lucky enough to, and struggle for the next 10 years of their lives and it's not really fair to those people."

His biggest gripe, though, with higher education isn't the over-the-top costs, it's the inadequate return on that "investment." There is a gap, Sims says, between what is being taught in colleges all over and the skills that are needed to actually succeed in the professional world.

Doing his part to address the issue, Sims, along with former classmate Ryan Bubinski, founded Codecademy, the easiest way to learn how to code. In a world that is become more and more digitized, Codeacademy's free lessons not only teach users how to program, but also "the skills they need to find jobs."

In a sit down at Codecademy's Manhattan headquarters, Sims explains why coding is a skill that everyone should learn and why doing so is one of the best things that people can accomplish for their professional selves in this latest Elite Daily exclusive video interview.